Stockton sign firm is letter perfect

STOCKTON - When you arrive at the Stockton headquarters of Mina-Tree Signs, one of the first to greet you is a small, graying poodle named Princess. When Princess makes her polite entrance, you know that business owner LeRoy Minatre cannot be far behind.

Services: Consulting, design, site surveys, engineering, obtaining permits and providing maintenance of signage are among the services offered.

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STOCKTON - When you arrive at the Stockton headquarters of Mina-Tree Signs, one of the first to greet you is a small, graying poodle named Princess. When Princess makes her polite entrance, you know that business owner LeRoy Minatre cannot be far behind.

The presence of a family pet in a business office might not seem especially noteworthy. But it tells you something about the values of the company Minatre founded nearly 46 years ago.

Mina-Tree Signs has 26 employees, many of whom have been with the company for decades. The low turnover, like the presence of Princess, speaks volumes about the family atmosphere at Mina-Tree, General Manager Kathy Miller said. She has been with the company for nearly 20 years.

"It's the family environment," Miller said last week during a tour of the company's sprawling manufacturing facility just off West Lane in central Stockton. "LeRoy makes everybody feel like family. Everybody gets along really well. Everybody pulls together. Having a good example set by LeRoy on how he treats employees keeps them here."

Minatre said, "We treat them like they're people, not like they're machines. We really respect them for what they do and can do, and they pass that feeling on to others who are working under them."

The 78-year-old Minatre has lived in Stockton since he was 5 years old. He founded his business when he was 32, striking out on his own after working for another company.

Mina-Tree has grown through the years from a local business to one that has clients in 13 states, Puerto Rico, England, China and Japan. Minatre's 53-year-old son, Curtis, has worked for his father's company for nearly 30 years.

"He does all our out-of-state surveys and estimating," LeRoy said. "He's a great right-hand man."

Clients include Wells Fargo Bank and University of the Pacific. The biggest change to the business through the years, Minatre said, has been the shift to computerized production of signage, work that used to be done by hand.

On a recent afternoon, 27-year employee Bob Niederbrach stood over an Accu-Bend Mini cutting machine as it spat out a 15-inch Wells Fargo letter "L" made of steel in just a few minutes. In his early days in the business, Niederbrach said, producing the "L" himself would have left his hands aching.

"You would bend them on a template," Niederbrach said. "It's come a long way."